I closed my eyes for a few seconds. Great, just
great, I thought. Let’s see: Afghanistan's ended as a bloody mess.
Hurricane Ida made a mess of my hometown. The pandemic’s still raging. There’s
still way too many unemployed. And now, this?
“Well, no, I hadn’t heard that,” I muttered at last, tired before the day had barely begun.
Well, there are still incurable optimists who will
have none of that negative talk about the stock market. They have kept it afloat for
years, even when their confidence appeared more like what onetime Federal Reserve
chair Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance.”
Later that day, on only my second trip to New York
City since the start of the pandemic, I saw the symbol of that hope in Lower
Manhattan, near Bowling Green. The sculpture I photographed then, which accompanies
this post, is formally named “The Charging Bull,” but many call it “The Wall
Street Bull.” So shall I (even though some cynics may say that far too much bull is peddled in the Financial District on a regular basis).
Italian-American artist Arturo Di Modica (who died in February this year) originally installed the 11-foot, 7,000-lb.
sculpture in time for Christmas 1989, in front of the New York Stock Exchange.
I don’t know many people who would turn their noses up at a free gift, but the
people in charge of the Stock Exchange did, and got it removed.
But in the meantime, the big creature had endeared
himself to many, many more others in the area, and they succeeded in transferring it two blocks
away, to its current location. Now it's a tourist magnet. (Indeed, I
had to wait quite a while for enough people to step away so that I could
catch the bull, so to speak, in all his glory, alone but ready to charge.)
You can read more about this outdoor sculpture in this post from the Web site “The Wall Street Experience.”
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